February 03, 2009
notes on poetics and politics: five paragraph essay
Over at I cite, Jodi Dean offers a thoughtful post on Tag clouds and the decline of symbolic efficiency. She seems to mean word clouds, of the sort produced by Wordle. Not much need to summarize her point at length: it concerns the descending trajectory plotted by Zizek through which language is decreasingly able to fight the power, and these word clouds as exemplary of same. "The meaning of words is not at stake in tag clouds," she writes. "Meaning is replaced by frequency, proximity, and duration."
We're sure this gets at something about word clouds, but not everything. Certainly not at what might be interesting and even communicative about them, or how one might think about them as possibilities rather than symptoms of decline. To encounter instantly the limits of Jodi's argument, imagine making the same claim — "Meaning is replaced by frequency, proximity, and duration" — about the notes in a piece of music. Language is not music, but neither it is qualitatively different; indeed, as Louis Zukofsky reminds us, some language approaches the limit of music to rather fine effect. And this brings us to what is most remarkable about Jodi's claim.
What is striking about the argument is not the small confusion regarding tags, a barely-relevant slip. Neither is it the potentially cranky kids-these-days aspect which periodically haunts Zizek. Rather, it is this: the claim depends, utterly and absolutely, on a rather narrow sense of "meaning," one on which the essay imagines we all agree without question.
The straitened sense of "meaning" is most evident from the position of poetry, poetry exactly. For Jodi's (and Zizek's) supposition is that meaning is merely a matter of denotation and perhaps connotation; that words don't bear anything else. Every poet knows this as mere error — that words communicate via a cloud of other mechanisms and avenues that get summarized (rather abruptly) under the heading of the materiality of the signifier. Even poets who don't cotton to such terminology make endless use of the material. And of course this has been true not merely of sound experiments and hermetic adventures, but the most politically charged poetries on record.
The implications of such a basic mistake bear some patient unfolding. For the moment, we'll note only that such a definition of meaning proposes what is basically an evidentiary account of language. Or, in the more common terms of the discussion, presents language as purely an expression of other material, rather than a material construction, generative of its own effects (including rhetorical and social effects). Language always includes both these characteristics, though poetry can be most sufficiently described as the form of language that most messes with the latter. One bears this in mind less as a definition of poetry than a description of what is parlously lacking in some considerations of the fate of the word.
Posted by jane at February 3, 2009 07:37 AM | TrackBack